Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A set of fundamental principles governs our reasoning about objects since infancy: solidity, continuity, and contact. Past studies have shown that adults can revise these principles given a small amount of counterevidence. However, how far would they generalize their revised beliefs? In the present experiments, we demonstrate that given a diverse set of counterevidence, adults changed their behaviors in subsequent maze games. These results demonstrate that adults can generalize their revised beliefs about the core object principles to a completely different virtual environment.